Swordpoint (2011) Read Free

serving the godless gang who ruled in Berlin. He was a good German and, though he didn’t believe the propaganda that blamed the war on the enemy, he certainly believed in Germany and knew that after the First World War the Allied politicians had never given her a chance to get on her feet again. He was not unusual in his loyalties. The general who was running the show was not only a Catholic, he was also a former Rhodes Scholar and graduate of Oxford, an anglophile, an officer with known anti-Nazi feelings and, above all, a lay member of the Benedictine Order.
    Reis lit a cigarette and looked over his personal stretch of front again. On his right was Highway Six, the road to Rome, running up the Liri Valley, and on his left, round the corner of the mountain, the ruined town of Cassino. Above and behind him was what was left of the monastery, and it gave him a comfortable feeling of security to know it was there. Just in front of it was the hill the British called Hangman’s Hill. Behind that lay the ridge they called Snakeshead, and Monte Cairo. Behind the town was Castle Hill which he knew as well as everybody else was – after San Eusebio – the key to the monastery. With San Eusebio in their hands, the Allies could see what was taking place on Castle Hill, and Castle Hill dominated the other outlying spurs. One by one, they led to the top, to the monastery itself.
    To the south of Cassino the land was flat until you reached the Arunci Mountains, the road heading across the plain for the town as straight as an arrow from south-east to north-west until it reached the iron bridge across the Rapido. On its south-western side was the railway, and both town and station were still securely held. Overlooked from the mountains behind, it had long been obvious to the Allies that an attempt to get at them would be spotted at once from the heights. The only way they could capture them was by crossing the river on the flank and moving along the bank on the German side, so that the strongpoints would wither on the stem. So far, after months of hammering, all they’d managed was a meagre foothold in the hills to the north.
    In all his days of soldiering, and they were many now, Reis had never seen a stronger position. The whole art of defence was to choose a place where you could see the enemy without being seen yourself; and here, in front of Monte Cassino, everything fitted those requirements perfectly. San Eusebio looked like a watch-dog waiting in the entrance to its kennel. Behind the village and curling round its sides was a high escarpment of rocks, covered here and there with thin bushes and small trees. This was the position’s only disadvantage because, unlike all the other German positions, it could not be covered by crossfire from the sides. With the village in British or American hands, the escarpment would protect the north end, where some of the buildings were actually built on to the cliff and where caves for wine cellars had been cut out of the rock. Leading from the river was a switchback road winding round its eastern slopes through a series of hairpin bends. In summer, trees softened the outlines but now, with the slopes bare and the gales sweeping the dark clouds across from the Abruzzi, the place seemed a stark symbol of defiance.
    The last of the British lorries disappeared and a final flurry of shells dropped across the river among the smoke which had been put down to hide their departure. Because they were seen everywhere they moved, the Allies could not hold the river bank. The Germans could see everything, even a single lorry or a single man. They could slip patrols across the river after dark to lay minefields on the approaches to the river, and, if the Allies managed later during the night to clear them, could lay them again the next night. Indeed, German patrols could roam almost at will on the opposite bank, while no Allied patrol ever managed to survive long on this side.
    ‘Wonder who’s taken